Grey County Update: Comfortable Passages and Rainbows

Through you honourable Warden Matrosovs,

At the most recent County Council meeting, the need for a palliative care plan in our County long‑term care homes was noted. As custodians of our community, it matters that we care for our neighbours in every stage of life—including as they pass from this life into eternal life.

Some friends and I plan to enroll in Laurentian University’s End‑of‑Life Doula Applied Certificate and to serve locally as Passage Comforters—a non‑clinical, complementary bedside presence that helps residents and families clarify goals of care, find peace, and avoid panic‑driven 911 calls.

What this could mean:

• For Grey County: fewer avoidable ambulance transfers and ED visits from LTC; reduced Paramedic Services time‑on‑task; lower after‑hours LTC overtime and agency reliance—all County cost lines you likely already track.
• For Ontario: fewer hospital admissions and ALC days from LTC; improved staff retention and morale; better alignment with the province’s palliative approach to care mandate.
• For Canada: stronger community‑based palliative capacity, improved caregiver well‑being, and a modest, evidence‑generating model for compassionate, cost‑aware end‑of‑life support.

We’re not asking you to decide anything today. We simply want to put this idea on your radar. If, in the future, Council wishes, you could try a small, capped, cost‑smart pilot and judge it using metrics already visible in your County EMS and LTC budgets (e.g., 911 calls from LTC, ED visits in the last 30 days of life, after‑hours RN overtime). If families want more time than the County chooses to fund, they could privately retain additional doula support, keeping public dollars focused on demonstrable savings.

Beyond the dollars, our purpose is simple: to help each person rest in the knowing that all is well and all will be well, and to cultivate forgiveness, love, kindness, and respect for free will—healing relationships with loved ones, and more broadly, that they may pass from peace into eternal peace. Spiritual sources indicate that dementia often reflects a profound difficulty in the family in letting go. When the family comes to peace with a loved one’s passing, the person may be freer to pass gently into eternal life, freeing up beds for others. Across traditions there are accounts of profoundly peaceful transitions—what Dzogchen Buddhism calls the rainbow body, and what Christians may recognize as transfiguration or even rapture. We promise no particular phenomena, yet we believe our LTC homes can become places where grace, reconciliation, and beauty are ordinary at the end of life—where it can feel, like living in a rainbow.

While rainbow body is fairly common in Asia, with one of most recent extravagant public examples being in 2013 with Lama Karma Rinpoche, where much of his body transformed into rainbows and only hair and nails were left. Though generally wouldn't expect the same extravagance in the west, "Death Doula's Guide" merely references the feeling of living in a rainbow, though there have been westerners that achieved full rainbow body, and there are even Christian references to it:

"and he was transfigured before them, and his face shone as the sun, and his garments did become white as the light," -- Matthew 17:2
"And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” Acts 1:9
"then we who are living, who are remaining over, together with them shall be caught away in clouds to meet the Lord in air, and so always with the Lord we shall be;" - 1 Thessalonians 4:17
"Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, surrounded by a cloud, with a rainbow over his head." -- Revelation 10:1

While rainbow body would certainly be a high aspiration and achieved with some saintly individuals, more realistically "Mass Dreams of the Future" study indicates that Phowa or meditating out of one's body  when one is ready to part becomes common by the latter half of this century, for those along the new age sylvan timeline.

Thank you for considering this gentle, practical enhancement to Grey County’s forthcoming palliative care plan. When the time is right, we’d be honoured to help.

With love and light,

"Realize that the essence of myth is to move the seeking entity by its own faith and its desire to know the truth over a kind of rainbow bridge, a magical covenantal span that links time and eternity, that which is known and that which is a mystery"  (Q'uo of the Confederation of Planets, 1989/04/30)
“As you present yourselves… you sit in jars of clay… yet you are not this physical vehicle. You simply reach into it… your rainbow self shimmers and glows and exceeds the boundaries of physicality.” (Q'uo, 2003/09/07).

May you be blessed,

Andrii Zvorygin
Passage Comforters (in formation)